DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This is old news for some of you, but I’ll risk boring you for the sake of anyone who hasn’t heard the story, which is an important one — certainly more important than most of the tripe I publish.

Microsoft is a successful company. They have huge amounts of cash, and access to the best and brightest minds on the planet. This makes their failures especially poignant, because they have fewer excuses than most anybody else.

The basic story is that Microsoft published a web page about a former Mac user who switched to Windows 2000. This was an apparent response to Apple’s “Switchers” campaign, which offers the reverse — stories of ex-Windows users who found happiness in the MacOS.

The frightening-but-funny reality is that Microsoft’s “switcher” story is a complete fabrication. For example, the image of the alleged switcher is a stock photo. And the unnamed switcher, when she came out of hiding, turns out to be an employee of the PR firm that Microsoft had hired to create the testimonial.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber posted an insightful analysis of the story and ensuing cover-up and denials. Part 1: Microsoft’s Answer to Ellen Feiss; part 2: Microsoft Make-Up

(Ellen Feiss, BTW, is one of Apple’s “Switchers.”)

Best quote, from Dave Winer as quoted by Gruber: “You’d think Microsoft could at least find one real person to say they made the switch from Mac to Windows and were happy about it.”

I didn’t make it to the mailbox yesterday, so today there was a double load of catalog crap squeezed from the ass of retail America: over 4 lbs total. That is not a typo — I had four pounds of catalogs in my mailbox. Lands End Kids, MacConnection, Art Institute of Chicago, Sundance (faux-rugged clothing for SUV drivers), Macy’s, Duncraft “Living with Nature” (gourmet birdseed?!), J. Jill (leisure clothing for old people), The Sharper Image (what kind of pocket translator defines you as a person?), Smith and Noble, Smith & Hawken, you’d like me to list Smith & Wesson but it’s probably not legal to advertise guns via direct mail — be very glad — Brookstone Hard-to-Find Tools (really, how hard can it be anymore? Brookstone has been selling the same stuff for 10 years.), Hold Everything, Chamber(pot)s by Williams Sonoma, L.L.Bean Winter Clothing, Dance Distributors. What a waste. Someday soon we’ll be mining landfills for fuel, and the enormous piles of discarded advertising will strike shame into our souls. How did this world go so wrong?

On that topic, I had a visitor to the house today. I was poring over Artisan Baking, scaling a bread recipe for party this weekend, with music cranked up in the background. Well, foreground. Maybe even surround-ground. The walls were shaking, and it wasn’t just because I was mirroring the double-bass line on the kitchen floor.

The doorbell rang. This is unusual. I’m too far out to get any solicitors, and most of the folks I want to find me can’t, like the time Airborne Express took three days to deliver an “overnight” package. There was a coincidental lull in the music, one of those sensitive vocals-and-keyboards passages that metal bands put in to maximize the aural contrast at the next 200 mph chorus, with multiple layers of fingerboard guitar solos and four-limbed drum fills playing in unison at inhuman speeds. (This is Elegy’s Forbidden Fruit album, the closest thing to speed-metal that I own.)

Anyway, I opened the door to see a heavyset but kind-looking woman clutching a stack of propaganda. “Religious pilgrim” was my immediate conclusion. I couldn’t see the Watchtower magazine, but I sensed it. Or maybe I caught a whiff of incense and desperation on the breeze. She leapt right into her pitch, with a line like “How did this world go so wrong?” For a second I thought I’d made a bad call, maybe she was here from the post office or the DMA, but junkmail is my irrational obsession, not hers.

I smiled, tuning out the spiel while I waited for a pause so I could deliver my “get the heck off my porch” message, tarted up to match her gingham of course. While I waited, I realized that the quiet part of the Elegy song was about to end. Remember, the stereo was still cranked up just behind me in the living room.

The “intro to damnation” speech was winding its way down, too. I listened to the speech, and the music, and the speech, and the music, back and forth in slow motion as they converged. The woman had closed with a question, and it was a total Dale Carnegie question I had to answer “yes” to, assuming I really was reading a cookbook and not, I don’t know, rinsing sacrificial calf blood off my Sawzall when she rang the doorbell, and in that pause when I was juggling a reply around in my head, Elegy’s rhythm section (i.e. the entire band) kicked in at full throttle, and a wall of high-volume heavy metal annihilation blasted across the room and smacked the woman in the face, which took on a sort of resigned “I’m in the wrong place, aren’t I” look, and my smile got a little bit bigger and a lot more genuine, as if to say, Yes, I’m the person your pastor warned you about.

After she left, I queued up I Am Woman: The Essential Helen Reddy Collection, just to spite her.

Fascinating reading: Great Moments in Science

The author, Karl Kruszelnicki, has a number of advanced degrees in science and a knack for writing up interesting bits of scientific history.

The Christmas shopping season has already begun. I believe the traditional start is one day after Thanksgiving, because Americans only have the mental capacity to plan one holiday at a time, and if Chrismas shopping really began this early, kids could end up with miniature roasted turkeys in their stockings, and little pools of potatoes and gravy coagulating beneath where they’ve leaked out through the toe.

Nonetheless, the catalog onslaught has begun. I fear my mailbox. Inside, every day, two or three glossy full-color catalogs appear, hawking everything from egg coddlers to synthetic-fiber briefs.

The worst of it is, the catalogs I’m drowning in aren’t even mine. Years of guarding my address have paid off — I get very little junk mail. The current deluge is for the people who just moved out of this house. Now I know why they moved away from this amazing place… they’d bought so much crap via mail-order that they ran out of space to store it all. Or maybe they’d spent so much on shipping that they couldn’t make their mortgage payments.

They received nearly every specialty-clothing catalog I’ve ever seen (J Crew, LL Bean, Patagonia), and some obscure titles that probably appeal to a smaller audience (mysportbra.com?!). They had more travel-goods and gadget catalogs than SkyMall (Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Brookstone, Herrington, Magellan’s, Travelsmith). And they had the oddball base covered too, especially the countrified kitsch variety (American Girl, Hearth and Plow). The shocking thing is that each one of these catalogs had a customer ID on the back, indicating that the vendors hadn’t simply rented the name and address — the people who used to live here had actually bought stuff from every one of these companies.

Wait, did I forget housewares? (Williams Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, Hold Everything, Macy’s). They sure haven’t forgotten me. Macy’s puts junk in my mailbox three days/week.

One of the ironies of my life is that I always loved to receive mail. All manner of exciting things could show up. But as I’ve gotten older, this simple pleasure has been stripped away by a world full of shysters. Nowadays, most of the mail I receive makes me angry or depressed: bills, political pitches, the inevitable catalogs, mail-grams from unknown mortgage brokers that quote the details of my mortgage in a terribly misguided effort to convince me that I should trust them with my money. (Perhaps that’s a rant for another time, but excuse me, why is the amount of my loan considered public knowledge?)

At my old house, it would occasionally happen that we’d get no mail. At the time, those days made me a little sad, as if I’d missed out on something. Now, I look forward to the quiet. So does the guy who hauls away my recycling.

Five years ago, before moving out here into the boondocks, I went into the local Post Office to rent a Box. The postal clerk was the most engaging, friendly, honest and helpful person I’d met in weeks — of course, I’d been dealing almost exclusively with bankers, brokers, and real estate agents at the time, so perhaps this isn’t saying much. This guy made an impression, though.

Soon we moved here, and I ended up going to the post office every couple of days to pick up my mail, which for lack of available PO Boxes was being forwarded to “general delivery.” I suppose that option exists at every post office, but I don’t suppose clerks in big-city post offices recognize their customers and greet them by name, saying “Let me get your mail.” I felt like the theme song from Cheers. This became my “life in a small town” story (replaced over time with other warm-and-fuzzy small-town experiences like neighbors sharing produce and meeting reclusive local celebrities and the inevitable septic-tank pumping).

Years passed. I stopped going to the post office as often, because that would entail putting on shoes. But I noticed something that made me uncomfortable about my favorite postal clerk — I could swear I remembered his name, but the tag on his shirt said something else. Was he borrowing a shirt that day? It was unsettling, but again, I didn’t go to the post office too frequently any more, so I never built up enough data to be certain.

Another year or two passed. I’d given up on addressing the clerk, for fear of getting his name wrong. And he didn’t seem to recognize me any more, either. Until last week… when he saw me come in, pushed away the little sign at his station reading “closed”, and called out a hearty greeting. “Is it Matthew or Michael?” he asked me, which made me laugh because often my parents (who have sons named Matthew and Michael) ask me the same thing. But here’s the impressive part — from the dregs of neglected synapses I managed to recover the clerk’s original name, the one he’d introduced himself to me as, and the mysterious shirt-name from years later, and asked him the same question back. I was extremely impressed with myself. It turns out that both the names I remembered were correct; the clerk had changed his name in the year after I moved here. And, he got new shirts.

Anyway, it was “nice to be seen,” as a friend used to say.